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The Moyka (, also Romanization as Moika) is a short river in Saint Petersburg which splits from the Neva River. Along with the Neva, the Fontanka river, and canals including the Griboyedov Canal and Kryukov Canal, the Moyka encircles the central portion of the city, effectively making that area an island or a group of islands. The river derives its name from the Ingrian language word Muya for "slush" or "mire", having its original source in former swamp. It is long and wide.
The river flows from the Fontanka river, which is itself a distributary of the Neva, near the Summer Garden past the Field of Mars, crosses Nevsky Prospect and the Kryukov Canal before entering the Neva river. It is also connected with the Neva by the Swan Canal and the Winter Canal.
In 1711, Peter the Great ordered the consolidation of the banks of the river. After the Kryukov Canal linked it with the Fontanka River four years later, the river became so much cleaner that its name was changed from Muya to "Moyka", the latter from the Russian verb "to wash". With the spread of cars and services for them in post-Soviet Russia, the Russian word Мойка has become a common sight unconnected to the river as it very often means (car)wash, which may confuse foreign tourists.
In 1736, the first Moyka quay was constructed in wood. Four bridges originally spanned the river: the Blue, the Green, the Yellow, and the Red. The Blue Bridge, now hardly visible underneath Saint Isaac's Square, remains the widest bridge in the whole city.
Magnificent 18th-century edifices lining the Moyka quay include the Stroganov Palace, Razumovsky Palace, Moika Palace, New Holland Arch, Saint Michael's Castle, and the last accommodation and museum of Alexander Pushkin.
15 bridges cross the Moyka. Most of these have historical and artistic interest:
The Moyka is a right-hand distributary of the Fontanka and starts its course immediately to the south of the Summer Garden, making the southern border of the garden Island and separating it from the reddish Saint Michael's Castle.
The Summer Garden and Palace, as well as the nearby Saint Michael's Castle and Garden, in post-Soviet Russia became branches of the national treasury of domestic art the Russian Museum and can be visited. The Summer Garden was mentioned by Alexander Pushkin both as his frequent place for pleasant walks, and as destination for childhood walks with a French governor of his classical for Russian literature novel in verse protagonist Eugene Onegin. The garden's Moyka fence was designed by Ludwig Charlemagne. and attributes of Roman ' authority - fasces]] Behind the fence there is a pond on which are released in warm season.
His arbitrary domestic and international politics caused dissatisfaction among some of his courtiers who plotted against him, and he was assassinated in his Castle bedroom despite all his precautions: the Castle was surrounded by Moat on all four sides, raised every night, yet the guard let conspirators pass as the latter included senior supervising officers.
After him the Castle was virtually neglected by the royal family of his eldest son and heir Alexander I of Russia and was used as a shared living space by some of the Imperial household until it was converted into a Military Engineering School whose cadets included the future writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. The cadets studied and lived in the building under Paul's third son, Alexander's successor Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, and the edifice became also known as Engineers' Castle.
Occupied then by various Soviet institutions like the Central Naval Library, now the Castle is part of Russian Museum, has been repaired and holds national exhibitions of art connected with history of Russia.
Next to the Castle, on the Fontanka over the water near the source of Moyka, stands a miniature statue Chizhik-Pyzhik of a little bird siskin across the river from the 19th-century Emperor's Law School, whose students' uniforms' colour matched the bird's colouration.
After the February 1917 democratic revolution that destroyed the Russian autocracy, part of the field was used to bury the casualties of the revolutionary events, and in the Soviet times this part was made into the Monument to the Fighters of the Revolution, a memorial of granite slabs inscribed with dedications to the heroes by the Bolshevik Government Secretary for Education Anatoly Lunacharskiy, and a gas burner eternal flame was placed in the middle. Many cultivars of lilac were planted in the square. In post-Soviet Russia the rest of the field has seen a number of public political rallies.
Mikhailovsky Garden is across the Moyka from the Field of Mars and across Sadovaya ("Garden") Street. It is a 19th-century landscape garden, whose southern part meets the garden façade of Mikhailovsky Palace facing Arts Square not far from the city's main street Nevsky Prospect. The Palace, built for Paul I's fourth son Grand Duke Mikhail, was later in the 19th century converted to the royal museum of the nation's art named after Alexander III with the nationwide ethnographic department. These serve to this day as the Russian Museum and the Russian Ethnographic Museum. The garden's western side with a decorative fence faces another waterway, Griboyedov Canal originally named after Catherine II who commissioned it, but after the 1917 revolution renamed in honour of the playwright Alexander Griboyedov. Next to the garden there stands a brightly coloured tall church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood. This place of worship and now a museum was built in a traditional Russian style to mark the canalside spot on which Emperor Alexander II who had in 1861 abolished serfdom was on 1 March 1881, assassinated by terrorists from the Narodnaya Volya movement.
The bird is now on the crest of the city's large teacher-training university located in the former estate. Giving multilevel higher education at its colleges (faculties and institutes) grouped by school subjects and administrative spheres, in the 1990s it was recognised as having national importance. Named in the Soviet times after the 19th-century Russian liberal thinker and writer Alexander Herzen. The main campus has about 20 buildings occupying a large city block, while some colleges of the university are scattered around the city.
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